Barack Obama is on a pandering tour of college campuses, trying to generate enthusiasm for his re-election campaign by warning that interest rates on student loans will rise if Congress doesn’t act by July. That is true; the Democratic Congress wrote the legislation that way, and Obama signed it. Coincidentally, no doubt, Obama’s campus appearances will all be in swing states like North Carolina, where he spoke today. Whether it is a good idea to subsidize the higher education bubble is highly debatable, but it is not a point of differentiation between Obama and Mitt Romney, who also favors extending the existing legislation.

But what I want to focus on is another instance of the dishonesty that so consistently distinguishes Obama from more reputable politicians. Katrina Trinko has the story at The Corner:

In a speech today, President Obama misquoted Tea Party congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), omitting certain words of a comment she made to give a very different impression of what she had said.

Obama did not name Foxx, referring to her as “one Republican congresswoman.”

“She said she had ‘very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with debt because there’s no reason for that,’”Obama told the students at UNC Chapel Hill. “I’m just quoting here, I’m just quoting.”

“She said students who rack up student loan debt are just ‘sitting on their butts having opportunity dumped in your lap,” he added. “I’m reading it here. So I didn’t make this up.”

But the full Foxx quote is very different.

“I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that,” Foxx said last week, per the Huffington Post.

What a liar Barack Obama is! And, like many liars, he has certain “tells.” Note how he compounds his offense by assuring his readers that he is telling the truth: “I’m just quoting here, I’m just quoting…I’m reading it here. So I didn’t make this up.” Sure, it’s on his teleprompter, so it must be right. Any time Obama goes out of his way to assure his audience that he is telling the truth, you probably can assume that he is lying. Again.

For the factual record, if George W. Bush had tried to do something this outrageous, the mainstream media would have crawled up his rectum and stuck sharp probes into his insides.

The Today show’s segment, which included an ellipsis on screen to indicate omitted text, ran as:

Zimmerman: ‘This guy looks like he’s up to no good …’

Zimmerman: ‘He looks black.’

The full conversation ran as:

Zimmerman: ‘This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.’

Dispatcher: ‘OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?’

Zimmerman: ‘He looks black

That is exactly what the most deceitful demagogue who has ever sat in the White House did here: the half-truth that amounts to a whole lie. He just took out the part that he didn’t like and then warped the truth with the rest.

What Virginia Foxx was VERY CLEARLYdescribing was students who use their college loan money the same damn way that homeowners who use their third and fourth mortgages did: you can party it up and buy whatever strikes your fancy until the bill comes due when you start whining about it or you can show a little responsibility.

I saw the above frequently as a student, and I also saw it as a professor: dirt-poor students living high on the hog with the thousands of extra dollars they get from their student loan checks – which often significantly exceed the cost of tuition and books.

If you’re even the $80,000 in debt that Foxx described as her low figure, and you aren’t in a high-paying career field (engineer, etc.) with a well-thought-out plan for repayment, you are an idiot. And the only idiot more idiotic than you was the government that subsidized your Harvard lesbian studies degree in the first place.

The thing is that Barack Hussein is a serial liar and slanderer without shame, virtue or honor. So lies for him are a dime a dozen:

President Barack Obama used Rep. Todd Akin as Exhibit A in his case portraying Republicans as extremists today.

Obama didn’t mentioned Akin—a St. Louis County congressman who is running for U.S. Senate—by name. But the president quoted—or misquoted—Akin (depending on who you believe) in a speech on student loans at the University of Iowa.

“You’ve got one member of Congress who compared these student loans — I’m not kidding here — to a ‘stage-three cancer of socialism’,” Obama told the crowd.

“Stage-three cancer? I don’t know where to start,” Obama continued. “Come on. Just when you think you’ve heard it all in Washington, somebody comes up with a new way to go off the deep end.”

Obama was referring to comments Akin made at a recent debate with his two GOP rivals in the Senate contest, John Brunner and Sarah Steelman.

Akin said at that forum that the government should not be involved in the student loan business.

“America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,” he said, according to media reports.

Today, Akin said the president was misquoting him. “With all due respect… I was not saying that student loans are a cancer. I referred to the policies where there is a government takeover of private industries,” such as health care and student loans.

The thing about the very real fact that there has been a federal government takeover of student loans comes down to this: we are at a state of crisis with our student loan debt.

The universities are dominated by leftists and unions, through and through. And they don’t give a damn about the students. Want to know why tuition keeps going up and up? Because the university leftists and the government leftists are on the same page. Every single time the tuition goes up, the government-backed student loans go up – which allows colleges to raise tuition further. The only way to get an education today is to go massively in debt.

Imagine if the government wasn’t interfering in the system. Few students would be able to afford the ridiculous tuition. And so guess what would happen? The tuition would go down.

Which is to say the government – interfering with the private market – is artificially screwing it up. Just like they always do.

The college tuition program began as a noble idea: to help returning WWII veterans integrate and assimilate into the American workplace via the G.I. Bill. But that noble program was used to justify subsequent extensions and additions that over time simply became THE PROBLEM.

So, to expand on Rep. Akin’s point, if the government WEREN’Tinterfering in the student loan system, universities would be forced to look at a reality that they are protected from considering now. They would have to consider the fact that their clientele – students – cannot possibly afford to pay for their product. And they would have to make their product – education – less expensive or go out of business. And if the government just got the hell out of the student loan industry – expect for our veterans and a few specific targeted careers that directly benefit the nation – you would begin to see the cost of education drop precipitously as competition worked its magic.

And, yes, liberals did the same thing with mortgages. They forcibly subsidized the mortgage market and forced the banks to make ridiculous loans and artificially created a bubble of inflated housing prices that eventually had to crash to the massive detriment of the economy. And then they blamed Republicans – who tried in vain to stop the disaster from happening – for their mess.